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The Conversion Agenda

March 7, 2012

Human Rights’ Other Face

Money laundering involves channeling illegal funds through a complex web of transactions to make the money’s character increasingly ambiguous, and eventually, to pass it through lawful business activities that turn it into ‘legal’ money. Fortunately, there is a worldwide movement led by the United States to fight this.

However, there is also another kind of ‘laundering’ that plays the same type of subterfuge, lacks transparency, but thrives unchallenged. I am referring to the vast network of ‘human rights’ programs and activism involving globalized NGOs (Non-Government Organizations), government programs, religious institutions, and private funding sources that promote conflict and sometimes become fronts for insurgencies and separatist movements of various kinds. One man’s terrorists are another man’s freedom fighters, and this turns into an opportunity for doublespeak.

There are many other kinds of conflicts-of-interest which are even harder to pin down, but which nevertheless entail great abuse of the power that comes from being ‘givers’ and ‘helpers.’ For example, National Public Radio broadcast a series on widespread sexual abuses of women in famine-stricken parts of Africa. The culprits were UN employees, contractors and local volunteers who traded food for sex to desperate mothers and young women either through gross intimidation or through more ambiguous methods of ‘persuasion.’ The culprits used the ‘moral authority’ and power conferred by their position of being the ‘givers’ and ‘human rights activists’ in a fairly blatant way to violate the minds, values and bodies of the downtrodden they claimed to help.The Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble recently said: ‘One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry. They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims.’ His words drew an angry reaction from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the world’s biggest human rights groups, with more than a million members worldwide. (The Guardian, January 29, 2004)

To be clear, I believe that just as most international commerce is honest and law-abiding but can be misused to disguise unlawful activities, similarly most human rights activists and NGOs are genuinely engaged in good work, but the human rights ‘industry’ presents opportunities for mischief-makers who learn to ‘work the system.’

Thriving on ambiguity

Just as many honest businessmen can unwittingly get sucked into others’ laundering schemes, likewise many noble activists and NGOs may be unintentionally facilitating nefarious activities. However, in both the case of money laundering and the case of what I regard as ‘human rights laundering,’ there is the group of middlemen at various points of the food chain who know or should know what the ultimate result of this work will be, but who prefer to look the other way and claim innocence and ignorance.

What makes this complex is that many human rights resources and activities are of a dual-application nature: One side helps human rights but the other side of the same coin undermines the native culture or the integrity of the nation and could even be encouraging insurrections. In the case of tangible goods and technologies, there is now a well-defined concept of dual-use that refers to technologies that are both used in military and in civilian applications. Trade laws are formulated to deal with these items, often by imposing the same restrictions that would apply if they had only military applications.

Consider the following examples of dual-applications in human rights charities: A school building that was funded for education is also used for promoting insurgencies during off-hours. A vehicle funded for transporting students, patients and doctors also facilitates proselytizing. A person salaried for charity is also ‘volunteering’ for proselytizing and/or politics that would be disallowed under the terms of the grant if made public. A charitable hospital is used to preach to and convert the sick or dying, when their defenses and decision-making ability are at their lowest and when their need to trust the care provider is at its highest. An activist receiving grants, awards and visibility through foreign travel becomes famous, and then deploys this symbolic capital to promote specific geopolitical agendas linked (covertly) to the grant-award-publicity sources.

The funding agencies and NGOs who are involved typically deny any knowledge of the ‘other use’ being made of the grants or programs. And often these are very difficult charges to prove in practice. In the absence of “proof,” there has been little hue and cry over this, nor am I aware of any public-interest litigation.

Furthermore, the links are murky by their very nature: Clearly, a fat grant for charity empowers the person or organization to also do entirely ‘unrelated work’ of their own choice, but even if caught in such an act, the person would claim that this was unrelated ‘personal’ work that was done as a volunteer and nothing more.

In the absence of open debate on these issues and in the absence of transparent controls, a nexus of foreign agencies with funding power is playing a role in determining a. the definition of human rights, b. the choice of whose rights are to be fought for according to political calculations, and c. the culprits who are to be blamed. Selective outrage about human rights violations seems to conveniently match an institution’s geopolitical interests, lending a moral gloss to amoral pursuits.

Human rights and imperialism

In the 19th century, the British persecuted Indian culture in the name of protecting the rights of common Indians: Women in Punjab were denied property rights under new British laws that claimed to save them from their own culture and this ultimately led to today’s dowry murders. Workers were ‘protected from exploitation’ by Indian manufacturers of steel and textiles, by abolishing these industries from India and relocating them to start Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Land ownership was redistributed to British-selected zamindars, by using excuses of human rights abuses of the prior owners or rulers. The English language education replaced education in Sanskrit, Persian and local languages, in order to rid us of ‘our monstrous superstitions’ and make us ‘rational and civilized.’ Indian civil servants and babus were trained for the sake of this ‘civilizing mission’ of the Empire. In other words, we have seen the deceptive and destructive side of ‘human rights’ activism before, or rather, political exploitation in the guise of ‘human rights’ or ‘civilizing’ missions.

The parallel is even stronger: The imperialists enticed many Indians as sepoys and babus working for the Empire, or else the British would not have been successful in ruling over a much larger population of their own. In the same manner, today we find many Indian idealists often start out naïvely with good intentions, but eventually succumb to the international human rights industry’s lure of grants, travel, fame, the glamour of five-star events, and the reputational value and prestigious awards from being a human rights advocate. Many young Indians project this as an ornament symbolizing membership into the cool and sexy club of global culture. Some idealists are even more fundamentally ‘converted’ to Western theoretical constructs and instinctively adopt these lenses to misunderstand their own heritage. Once uprooted from their native culture, idealistic Indians become sepoys to fight against Indian culture and nation.

Part II: US faith-based initiatives

On a recent trip to India, I was given a copy of Tehelka’s February 7th, 2004 issue which has a cover story titled, ‘George Bush has a big conversion agenda in India.’ (There is a smaller follow-up article in the February 14th issue.) This investigative report developed by Tehelka’s undercover team of journalists makes the following points:

  1. The US government’s faith-based initiatives have funded major Christian groups in the US to pursue religious conversions in India, as a part of Pat Robertson’s strategy. These funds are officially channeled for social work only, but are used for dual-purposes, to convert as well as provide social services. (Note, by contrast, that when US government commercial contractors divert government money for personal uses, they land in prison.
  2. A part of this program in India is to develop a database for every PIN code (the equivalent of ZIP codes), and this database is being given to US intelligence agencies. Far more detailed than anything available to Indian authorities, this is a database of immense precision about every tiny locality in the hinterlands of India. It lists local Indian religious and other influential leaders of each jati, their practices and vulnerabilities, and is used to select the appropriate methodologies to wage a conversion micro-war in individual localities. (In the world of commerce, this is called ‘database marketing’ and such a database would be the envy of any corporate marketing vice president.) Tehelka claims that the database is being used to dispatch faith-based ‘services’ by decision-makers located in the US, with great precision and speed.
  3. These activities are also claimed by Tehelka to be linked to forces that are subversive to India’s integrity.
  4. This raises several issues involving the dual nature of these activities, both from the American perspective and from the Indian perspective. From the American perspective, the following issues need to be examined:
  5. Do some of these US-funded activities violate the church/State constitutional separation, and, furthermore, do they favor some denominations of religions over others?
  6. Do some of these activities violate the goals of US faith-based funding which was meant to be used for the betterment of downtrodden Americans, so as to reduce the burden on government-run programs, and was not intended for use overseas?

In other words, just as money-laundering uses secrecy of off-shore organisations with murky ownership structures to create ambiguity of use, is US public money being sent via a complex web of off-shore groups for purposes that are disallowed for government funding within the United States? All I wish to raise here is the awareness of such a potential issue, and to ask: Why is there no US Congressional or media inquiry into the alleged use of US taxpayer funds for foreign conversions without the knowledge of US taxpayers?

From the Indian side, the issues this provokes are as follows:

  1. Why is this not among the issues on the negotiation table as part of US-India dialogues? These activities, if true, would have adverse consequences for India’s integrity.
  2. Are the conflict-of-interest regulations and disclosure requirements for public officials and ex-officials in India adequate?
  3. What mechanisms are being put in place to better monitor foreign-nexus grants and other kinds of problematic influences, and yet do this in ways that minimize the disruption of the transparent groups doing important charitable work?

Furthermore, there are also important US-India mutual interests that were explained in my previous Rediff column, about the dangers of such projects turning into foreign misadventures: They potentially undermine India’s stability and play into the hands of subversive forces, which could eventually backfire on US interests as has happened in Pakistan and other places many times.

The issue at hand is not about any religion but about the risk that groups with multiple agendas present. It is likely that many persons involved in authorizing these grants are unaware of the details of these dual purposes, and/or of the subsequent consequences of the chain-reactions of events they might be triggering inadvertently. The chain-reactions entail the following sequence of transactions, analogous to many complex money-laundering schemes:

  1. The US government funds some US faith-based charities.
  2. These charities fund non-US subsidiaries or affiliates.
  3. The foreign groups fund conversions and/or local politics which create or aggravate conflicts.
  4. These activities play into the hands of separatists and insurgents.
  5. This destabilises India culturally and politically.
  6. This instability is a time-bomb that could some day strengthen the hand of Taliban-like forces. This would be bad for US geopolitical interests in the long term.
  7. American citizens’ security, ethical and moral interests suffer as a result, ironically, using their own money but without their knowledge.

Given this complex chain of cause and effect through multiple stages and intermediaries, it has been easy to overlook the overall schemes, whether intentional or not.

The sound of silence

The lions of Indian activism climbed on rooftops with their megaphones when Tehelka previously exposed allegations of corruption against George Fernandes: They demanded that everyone remotely linked to his work should resign and go to jail. However, given their hush silence over this latest Tehelka report, one wonders whether these Indian lions have turned into Western lapdogs and become the bearers of global evangelism.

Indian activists have orchestrated a massive hue and cry over NRI funding of suspicious Hindutva activities — such open inquiries are indeed important in bringing transparency. However, the dual-purpose funds being channeled from Western institutions dwarf the alleged size of suspicious Hindutva funds. Foreign organisations pressuring for a politically weak, unstable and fragmented India seem to have bought the complicity of enough five-star activists and intellectuals.

However, some other countries have spoken up against similar schemes — see Thailand, for example.

Part III: Who is responsible for the anti-India campaign in the US?

The terrorist-activist axis

In recent years, the Indian police and press have started to pay attention to certain groups with ‘peace,’ ‘civil liberties’ and ‘human rights’ identities.

Often, the scholars’/activists’ assistance is by legitimizing a radical group through endorsement, such as when the Communist Party of India, Marxist Leninist Liberation honored the kin of about 1,000 ‘comrade martyrs’, i e terrorists, at an event graced by several prominent ‘social activists, environmentalists, and writers-turned-activists.’ There are various cross-ideological alliances for activism in India where separatists of various kinds, Islamists, Christian fundamentalists and Leftists converge for collaborations. They blame Indian culture and Hinduism in particular as the fabric that holds India together, and wish to see it dismantled.

US-based Indian intellectuals

What has not been investigated adequately is the role of US-based intellectuals. Often, such ‘activism’ to champion the ‘downtrodden’ brings together well-known South Asian Studies scholars from powerful institutions, journalists and individuals linked to various Washington, DC based groups. There are numerous campus seminars and conferences promoting the ‘human rights’ face of these alliances. The funding mechanisms are complex and tough to unravel, because of dual-purpose work of individuals and groups.

A well-established coterie of Indian-Americans has been actively filing one-sided complaints against India’s alleged human rights violations to US authorities, with varying degrees of authenticity. Such activism has led to the recent blacklisting of India by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. This Commission itself exists largely to protect the
freedom of Christian evangelists to convert internationally. Rarely, if ever, has it condemned Christian countries over freedom of religion or investigated allegations against the proselytizers’ practices.

The US State Department declared in a recent report that India is a flawed democracy. Certain Indian Americans have played a pivotal role over the past decade in bringing about such condemnation, and they see this as the mere tip of the iceberg of what they wish to achieve in ‘exposing’ India, and in intellectually undermining India as a nation-state. Indeed, some of them insist that India is nothing more than an undesirable collection of conflicting groups.

In the reverse direction, these US-based scholars supply academic ‘theories’ and ‘strategies’ that feed the ground campaigns in India via Indian intellectuals and NGOs. Many of them are also members of political parties back in India, and hence their work tends to be dual-purpose. Yet, the potential violations of US laws that prevent funding of foreign political parties by US citizens have apparently not been looked into.

Ironically, many of these intellectuals are also aggressively raising millions of dollars from wealthy Indians in USA and India for these South Asian Studies programmes.

Geopolitical consequences

In critical geopolitical moments, these Indian Americans against India have diluted the USA’s pressure against Pakistan, by making the average American hyphenate India and Pakistan as ‘equal and same’ in socio-political respects. The recent Outlook article by Seema Sirohi gives a concrete example to illustrate how this is happening.

Such activism also undermines India’s democracy and due process of law, because it bypasses the use of legal means that are available in India to a far greater extent than in most other former colonies. Furthermore, such groups cannot show any concrete success in helping human rights by internationalising and sensationalizing the issues. They are disconnected and alienated from Indian heritage, which they look down upon as an embarrassment to their personal projection of Western identities.

The Fellowship

The reason for the lack of introspection by those involved is that many ‘enlightened NGOs’ see themselves as a fellowship of different kinds of rings of the heroic, wise and powerful. This ‘association for a new humanity’ is today’s equivalent of mythical Arthurian roundtables, secret societies (such as Freemasons and esoteric groups) and councils of the wise. But these forged alliances, no matter how well intended initially, tend to attract disparate tricksters who corrupt other minions into becoming ‘behind the scenes’ power mongers. The ethics of deceit and treachery becomes the collective shadow and feeds ‘structural violence,’ i e destabilisation.

The real challenge facing the ‘save the world’ movement is the problem of recognising and dealing with the shadowy subversive ties of such fellowships.

Finally, every monopolistic fellowship develops both defensive and offensive strategies and tends to overreact when threatened in unanticipated ways: Hence, whistleblowers are often vilified, and their reputations and persons attacked to keep the wall of silence intact in the world of Human Rights Laundering.

Practical issues

I leave the reader to ponder the following questions:

  1. Is there a need to investigate the potential existence of a transnational axis to undermine India, involving certain South Asian Studies scholar-activists in America, Indian NGOs and major US funding institutions, potentially with complicity or lack of knowledge of the full consequences?
  2. Should there be a US Congressional hearing into the use of US taxpayer money to favor and spread one religion out of the many American religions in foreign lands?
  3. Should there be a conflict-of-interest policy and code of ethics that will focus attention on ‘dual use’ human rights activities, and also prevent abuses of the power that givers have over receivers? Should there be restrictions against co-mingling of funds, people or other resources between secular apolitical philanthropy on the one hand, and either religious activity or political activity on the other? As in the case of airport security and in the case of policing money-laundering, the inconveniences caused by adopting measures of transparency in human rights work would be outweighed by the benefits to society.
  4. Should there be voluntary disclosure by all individuals and organisations in the human rights and charity fields, concerning their transnational funding and links, such that the public and other organisations have the information to be able to make their own evaluations?
  5. Are the numerous instances of US originated anti-Hinduism and anti-India scholarship merely random cases of the individual prejudices and personal bigotry of scholars, or are they a part of entrenched systemic biases?

Published: March 24, 2004

 

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Hindu Good News

March 6, 2012

The world is in a time of transition. Globalization, increasing movement of people across national boundaries, environmental challenges, religious conflict, emerging economies and a multi-polar world all demand shifts in thinking to resolve age-old human dilemmas and problems.

Many of the solutions offered for resolving today’s challenges, seem tired, dated and inadequate. They and the institutions created to propagate them stem primarily from the worldview of the West, which has been dominant in world affairs for almost half a millennium. This worldview in turn has been profoundly shaped by the history, myths, intellectual traditions and religious beliefs particular to Europe and America.

As the pendulum swings once again towards Asia and emerging economies and powers stir and find their cultural voices, we stand at a moment of opportunity. Many of us could be dismissive of the world’s diverse voices as we are wont to do – especially when they challenge long-held beliefs. Or we could admit new paradigms, disruptive as they may be to the privileged position of the West, yet promising in their ability to shape the world anew not only for the benefit of Westerners, but for all humanity.

One of the old paradigms which we have all heard is presupposed in the phrase “good news” used by Christians. (The phrase “good news” is a literal translation of the word gospel, which refers to the accounts of Jesus’s life in the bible.) The Christian Good News is usually associated with the saving acts of God through the sacrifice on the cross of his only son, Jesus Christ, for the atonement of the sins of humanity. Yet Hindus find such atonement unnecessary. For man is not inherently sinful, but divine. And we, every one of us, is endowed with the same potential as Jesus, to uncover this divinity within ourselves in the here and now – without the need for someone else’s past sacrifice. To explain this empowering idea I have coined the term, “Hindu Good News”™

Such glad tidings are only a glimpse into the Hindu Good News™, which exalts man’s own potentialities, emphasizes the essential unity of God, man and the cosmos, and insists that diversity rather than uniformity are the truest understanding of reality. Some of the key promises of such a worldview include the following:

– There is no such thing as Original Sin in the typical Christian sense. We are all originally divine as described by the Sanskrit term, sat-chit-ananda

– Historical prophets and messiahs do not control access to spiritual truth, as in Christianity and most Abrahamic religions. Yoga and related spiritual practices allow us to achieve a state of freedom from history – including historically shaped communal identities, races, bloodlines, and claims of religious exclusivity based on some unique historical event. In other words, we are not dependent on historical prophets, or the institutions of power that evolved based on them.

– There is no fundamental conflict between dharma and science, nor has there been any in the past in the dharma traditions.

– There need be no fear of “chaos” as in much Western cosmology and myth. What is often considered chaotic in the negative sense is merely the natural and normal manifestation of reality. It is only the limits of human cognition that misinterpret nature’s complexity, viewing it as fearful and evil, and worthy of annihilation.

– A blissful human life is possible while remaining respectful of nature. Nature need not be ravaged in order to “advance” and “progress” – indeed our own evolution would be hastened without the violation of the web of interconnectivity that sustains us.

– There is no need for any centralized religious authority whatsoever to advance us to our ultimate potential. One may experiment and discover one’s own path using the discoveries and tools of past exemplars as guidelines.

– Mutual respect among all faiths and traditions is a matter of principle in Hinduism, not a bow to “political correctness” or a grudging necessity imposed from without. It goes far beyond mere “tolerance” for others who follow different paths. We reject claims of exclusiveness and mandates to convert others to one’s own religion.

Published: March 6, 2012

 

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Dharma is Not the Same as Religion

March 5, 2012

The word “dharma” has multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used. These include: conduct, duty, right, justice, virtue, morality, religion, religious merit, good work according to a right or rule, etc. Many others meanings have been suggested, such as law or “torah” (in the Judaic sense), “logos” (Greek), “way” (Christian) and even ‘tao” (Chinese). None of these is entirely accurate and none conveys the full force of the term in Sanskrit. Dharma has no equivalent in the Western lexicon.

Dharma has the Sanskrit root dhri, which means “that which upholds” or “that without which nothing can stand” or “that which maintains the stability and harmony of the universe.” Dharma encompasses the natural, innate behavior of things, duty, law, ethics, virtue, etc. Every entity in the cosmos has its particular dharma — from the electron, which has the dharma to move in a certain manner, to the clouds, galaxies, plants, insects, and of course, man. Man’s understanding of the dharma of inanimate things is what we now call physics.

British colonialists endeavored to map Indian traditions onto their ideas of religion so as to be able to comprehend and govern their subjects; yet the notion of dharma remained elusive. The common translation into religion is misleading since, to most Westerners, a genuine religion must:

1) be based on a single canon of scripture given by God in a precisely defined historical event;
2) involve worship of the divine who is distinct from ourselves and the cosmos;
3) be governed by some human authority such as the church;
4) consist of formal members;
5) be presided over by an ordained clergyman; and
6) use a standard set of rituals.

But dharma is not limited to a particular creed or specific form of worship. To the Westerner, an “atheistic religion” would be a contradiction in terms, but in Buddhism, Jainism and Carvaka dharma, there is no place for God as conventionally defined. In some Hindu systems the exact status of God is debatable. Nor is there only a single standard deity, and one may worship one’s own ishta-devata, or chosen deity.

Dharma provides the principles for the harmonious fulfillment of all aspects of life, namely, the acquisition of wealth and power (artha), fulfillment of desires (kama), and liberation (moksha). Religion, then, is only one subset of dharma’s scope.

Religion applies only to human beings and not to the entire cosmos; there is no religion of electrons, monkeys, plants and galaxies, whereas all of them have their dharma even if they carry it out without intention.

Since the essence of humanity is divinity, it is possible for them to know their dharma through direct experience without any external intervention or recourse to history. In Western religions, the central law of the world and its peoples is singular and unified, and revealed and governed from above.

In dharmic traditions, the word a-dharma applies to humans who fail to perform righteously; it does not mean refusal to embrace a given set of propositions as a belief system or disobedience to a set of commandments or canons.

Dharma is also often translated as “law,” but to become a law, a set of rules has to be present which must: (i) be promulgated and decreed by an authority that enjoys political sovereignty over a given territory, (ii) be obligatory, (iii) be interpreted, adjudicated and enforced by courts, and (iv) carry penalties when it is breached. No such description of dharma is found within the traditions.

The Roman Emperor Constantine began the system of “canon laws,” which were determined and enforced by the Church. The ultimate source of Jewish law is the God of Israel. The Western religions agree that the laws of God must be obeyed just as if they were commandments from a sovereign. It is therefore critical that “false gods” be denounced and defeated, for they might issue illegitimate laws in order to undermine the “true laws.” If multiple deities were allowed, then there would be confusion as to which laws were true.

In contrast with this, there is no record of any sovereign promulgating the various dharma-shastras (texts of dharma for society) for any specific territory at any specific time, nor any claim that God revealed such “social laws,” or that they should be enforced by a ruler. None of the compilers of the famous texts of social dharma were appointed by kings, served in law enforcement, or had any official capacity in the state machinery. They were more akin to modern academic social theorists than jurists. The famous Yajnavalkya Smriti is introduced in the remote sanctuary of an ascetic. The well-known Manusmriti begins by stating its setting as the humble abode of Manu, who answered questions posed to him in a state of samadhi (higher consciousness). Manu tells the sages that every epoch has its own distinct social and behavioral dharma.

Similarly, none of the Vedas and Upanishads was sponsored by a king, court or administrator, or by an institution with the status of a church. In this respect, dharma is closer to the sense of “law” we find in the Hebrew scriptures, where torah, the Hebrew equivalent, is also given in direct spiritual experience. The difference is that Jewish torah quickly became enforced by the institutions of ancient Israel.

The dharma-shastras did not create an enforced practice but recorded existing practices. Many traditional smritis (codified social dharma) were documenting prevailing localized customs of particular communities. An important principle was self-governance by a community from within. The smritis do not claim to prescribe an orthodox view from the pulpit, as it were, and it was not until the 19th century, under British colonial rule, that the smritis were turned into “law” enforced by the state.

The reduction of dharma to concepts such as religion and law has harmful consequences: it places the study of dharma in Western frameworks, moving it away from the authority of its own exemplars. Moreover, it creates the false impression that dharma is similar to Christian ecclesiastical law-making and the related struggles for state power.

The result of equating dharma with religion in India has been disastrous: in the name of secularism, dharma has been subjected to the same limits as Christianity in Europe. A non-religious society may still be ethical without belief in God, but an a-dharmic society loses its ethical compass and falls into corruption and decadence.

Published: March 5, 2012

 

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Order, Chaos and Creation

February 29, 2012

Indian scriptures talk of balancing chaos and order, while Western mythologies depict the two locked in a zero-sum battle in which order must triumph, writes Rajiv Malhotra.

In the Vedas and Upanishads, and in the vast canon of classical writings in Sanskrit, the search is always for balance and equilibrium with the rights of chaos acknowledged. In the creation stories in Genesis and in the Greek classics, there is a constant zero-sum battle between the two poles in which order must triumph…. This structure underlies much of Western culture and psychology….

Prajapati begets a universe

In Vedic literature, numerous stories recount the creator Prajapati’s efforts to beget a universe that would hold the two forces of order and chaos in equilibrium. His first attempt results in a creation which is insufficiently differentiated (jami), as it possesses too much order. This precludes integral unity because there are no sufficiently distinct components to cohere in the first place. They are undifferentiated and simply merge into each other, a state the Pancavimsa Brahmna refers to as a ‘nightmare’.

The second attempt at creation yields a universe which is too fragmented or chaotic (prthak, nanatva). When entities in the universe are too individualist, scattered, separated or different from each other — prthak, they cannot connect. What is desired is a creation which possesses a measure of distinction and individuality but avoids the quality of jami — i.e., it would be interconnected yet circumventing the equally undesirable state of prthak.

Ideal creation

Prajapati recognises that all life should be situated between these opposing excesses of too much identity differences and too much homogeneity. Ultimately, he succeeds in producing just such a universe. He does so through the power of resemblance, known as ‘bandhuta’ or bandhu…. The Vedas abound in attempts at finding connections among the numerous planes of reality. This serves as a cardinal principle of all Vedic thought and moral discourse.

Hinduism weaves multiple narratives around the central motif of cooperative rivalry between order (personified as devas) and chaos (personified as asuras). A key narrative shared by all the dharma traditions — the ‘churning of the milky ocean,’ or ‘samudra-manthan’ — shows the eternal struggle between two poles. The milky ocean is the ocean of consciousness and creativity, which is to be churned in order to obtain amrita, or the nectar of eternal life.

Two opposing sides are needed for churning. Curiously, both sides have a common father: Kashyapa (literally ‘vision’). The asuras’ mother is Diti (divided, limited), and so the asuras are the offspring of limited vision. The devas spring from Aditi (limitless), and they thus embody higher vision. The asuras usually have more brute strength, but both the power and strength of the asuras as well as the higher vision of the devas are needed for the churning. The to-ing and fro-ing between these archetypes is never-ending and also symbolises the spiritual struggles within the individual.

Delicate equilibrium

The devas grab the tail, the asuras, the head, of the cosmic serpent, using it as a rope which they wind around a mountain that serves a churning stick. They engage in a tug of war, pulling back and forth to churn the primordial ocean. The dualism is between knowledge and ignorance, though the latter should not be mistaken for sin or damnation. Asuric tendencies are not considered permanent essences but inner qualities that emerge at a given point in time. Their mutual tension does not get resolved with one side defeating the other, and their stalemate produces all sorts of wondrous and beneficial objects before open conflict breaks out over questions of priority in partaking of the nectar of immortality.

Significantly, nectar is produced only after a pot of poison emerges from the ocean — demonstrating yet again the interdependence between good and bad. The story points the way to the transcendence of both order and chaos, which are brought into delicate equilibrium and ultimately subordinated to spiritual realisation….

Crossovers and collusions

Some of the principal Vedic divinities, especially Agni, Soma and Varuna, are asuras who have crossed over to the side of the devas at the behest of Indra but who still retain their ambivalence and sinister aspects. At the end of the annual cycle — around the time of the new year festivals — the asuras are believed to return temporarily to their demonic status. Society, at the time, dissolves into chaos (as depicted playfully during the festival of Holi) before the ordered cosmos is renewed again.

In the co-operative rivalry between devas and asuras, the asuras often seem to be winning; there are frequent indications that the deepest knowledge and most exceptional powers are safeguarded by extremely ambivalent figures belonging to the camp of the asuras.

Such recurrent crossovers, collusions, and reversals serve to overturn and undermine the Western attitude towards chaos, which is dualistic and exclusivist: order versus chaos, insider or outsider, and so on.

Published: February 29, 2012

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A Different Kind of Hindu-Christian Dialogue

January 20, 2012

For over a decade, I have used interfaith exchanges as opportunities to introduce the concept of mutual respect and why it is superior to the patronizing notion of “tolerance” that is typically celebrated at such events. BEING DIFFERENT(Harpercollins, 2011), is entirely about appreciating how traditions differ from one another rather than seeing them as the same. In parallel with these works, I have been in conversations and debates with numerous thinkers of traditions other than my own.

One such dialogue has been with Father Francis Clooney, a noted Jesuit theologian and a leading professor of Religion at Harvard. Clooney not only took a good deal of time to read through my entire manuscript and write to me many useful comments, he and I have responded to each other’s public talks over the years and argued online. There have been agreements and disagreements, but with mutual respect. I wish to reflect on how this experience relates to my overall approach to interfaith dialogues.

Chapter 1 of my book cites numerous examples to show that most religious leaders feel more comfortable publicly taking the position that various traditions are the same as each other (even though in private teachings to their followers they emphasize their own side’s distinct advantages). I coined the term “difference anxiety” to refer to the anxiety that one is different from the other – be it in gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion or whatever else. The opposite of difference anxiety is difference with mutual respect, the posture I advocate for dialogue.

This is not merely a shift in public rhetoric, but requires cultivating comfort with the infinitude of differences built into the fabric of the cosmos. The rest of my book explains several philosophical foundations of the differences between the dharmic traditions (an umbrella term for Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) and the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

There are multiple audiences I wish to debate using this book, including those Hindu gurus who preach that all religions are the same, and many westerners who adopt an assortment of eastern spiritual practices in combination with their own Judeo-Christian identities and who blur differences or wish them away. I also respond to complaints that the acknowledgment of differences will lead to mutual tensions rather than mutual respect.

What particularly struck me from his talk and our subsequent conversation was his observation that most of his readings of prior Hindus have shown them to be either dismissive of Christian theology’s positions, or trivializing of the important Hindu/Christian differences, or reducing the differences to modern politics, rather than uncovering the deep structures from which the differences emanate. He also accepts my book’s emphasis that many Sanskrit terms cannot be simply translated into western equivalents.

We also disagreed on several points: For instance, Clooney views inculturation by evangelists as a positive posture of Christian friendship towards Indian native culture by adopting Indian symbols and words, whereas I find it to be often used as a mean to lure unsuspecting Indians into Christianity by making the differences seem irrelevant.

The significance of such an approach to dialogues is not dependent upon whether both sides agree or disagree on a given issue. In fact, I do not consider it viable to reconcile the important philosophical differences without compromise to one side or the other. Rather, the significance here is that we are comfortable accepting these differences as a starting point – which is more honest than the typical proclamations at such encounters where differences are taboo to bring up.

This approach to difference opens the door for any given faith to reverse the gaze upon the other in dialogue. Given the west’s immense power over others in recent centuries, the framing of world religions’ discourse, including the terminology, categories and hermeneutics, has been done using western religious criteria combined with subsequent western Enlightenment theories. In my book, I refer to this as Western Universalism and feel that this artificial view of non-western faiths has been assumed as the “standard” space in which all traditions must see themselves – leading to difference anxieties, and hence to the pressure to pretend sameness.

My hope is to hold more such dialogues with experts from as many other traditions as I can, and be able to freely share both areas of agreement and disagreement without pressure or guilt.

Hindu cosmology has naturally led me to this comfort with difference: The entire cosmos and every minutest entity in it is nothing apart from the One, i.e. there is radical immanence of divinity such that nothing is left out as “profane.” Hence, unity is guaranteed by the very nature of reality, eliminating the anxiety over difference at the very foundations. In fact, the word “lila” represents the profound notion that all these differences are forms of the One, and that all existence is nothing apart from divine play, the dance of Shiva.

Published: January 20, 2012

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‘Holy Spirit’ Is Not The Same As ‘Shakti’ or ‘Kundalini’

December 31, 2011

In the fashionable search for sameness in all religions, Holy Spirit in Christianity is often equated with Shakti or kundalini in Hinduism. However, these terms represent different, even incompatible cosmologies.

Early Vedic literature describes a supreme being whose creative power (Shakti) manifests the universe. Shakti is subsequently systematized as the Universal Goddess with sophisticated theology and worship. She is the matrix and primordial material substance of the universe, its consciousness and power, and the agency differentiating all forms.

In Christianity, though the Holy Spirit is also “within” the human, there is a strong emphasis on the descent from above or outside. Furthermore, unlike Shakti, the Holy Spirit is not seen as the essence of human selfhood (“soul”) or the essence of the cosmos.

Christianity assumes an inherent dualism between God and creation. This necessitates historical revelations along with prophets, priests and institutions to bring us the truth. But Shakti, being all-pervading, obviates dependence on these; its experience can be discovered by going within through yoga. Since the universe is nothing but Shakti’s immanence, nearly every Hindu village worships its own form of the Goddess as the deity. Eco-feminism is built into the cosmology.

Shakti is always available to be experienced in our physical body as a series of currents, with seven focal points called chakras. A powerful concentration of Shakti known as kundalini lies dormant at the base of everyone’s spine. Numerous spiritual techniques can arouse kundalini and channel it upward through the chakras, awakening one into unity consciousness.

The human body is conceived differently in Christianity: on the one hand created in the image of God, yet it is also the means of transmitting original sin and lays a person open to “evil spirits.”

In Hinduism, the guru helps awaken the disciple’s kundalini and integrate the experience into ordinary life. The experience is not interpreted through a specific history as in Christianity. Kundalini-like manifestations have occurred sporadically among Christians, but mainstream churches treat them as aberrations and even as the work of the devil. Those who have such experiences are conditioned to doubt their own sanity and are often regarded as mentally ill and even institutionalized.

In Hinduism, there is no evil spirit or demonic Shakti. Rather, Shakti encompasses all polarities, being simultaneously one and many, light and dark, supportive and violently transformative; both sides of such pairs must be integrated in spirituality. Hinduism easily embraces the fierce, dark Kali alongside the nurturing Parvati. Christianity’s emphasis on good/evil dualism results in fear of possession by evil spirits. This is often projected onto heathen or pagan religions, and particularly onto Kali, whose aesthetics shock Westerners. The name of Jesus is sometimes invoked, or a Bible kept on hand, to get rid of such evil spirits.

Hinduism sees that any negative effects of kundalini awakening stem from the individual’s preconditioning and nature, and not from evil spirits. Electricity is a helpful analogy. Neither inherently good nor evil, each electrical mechanism responds according to its own qualities. Yogis have fearlessly experimented with kundalini just as scientists do with electricity.

Shakti is explicitly feminine and has myriad representations. The Holy Spirit has also at times been conceived as female, yet, Christianity’s most prominent female figure, the Virgin Mary, is not identical with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit mysteriously incarnates Jesus in Mary’s womb, but this experience is exceptional and is impossible in other humans (whereas Shakti can be experienced by everyone). There are no spiritual practices designed to elicit Mary’s experience in all Christians, except metaphorically.

Many cross-cultural experts draw a parallel between kundalini awakenings and the phenomena associated with Pentecostal worship. Like shaktipat, or guru-awakened kundalini, Pentecostal experiences can involve extreme bodily responses triggered by a charismatic leader. However, to contain the risk of heresies, these experiences are carefully coded within the context of the historical struggle for salvation from sin that is available only by the grace of Jesus. Unlike Shakti, the Holy Spirit is not experienced as one’s inner essence manifesting through personal yoga but as an external and transcendent force invoked by communal prayer. Pentecostals are especially alert to the danger of evil spirits, and warn against any spiritual experience coming from a non-Christian, making a Hindu guru especially suspect.

Many Westerners have appropriated aspects of the Hindu Goddess to address issues within Christianity, in particular its patriarchy, institutions, weak ecological base and absence of yoga. While this is laudable, great care must be taken that core Hindu notions such as Shakti are not imported as mere “add-ons.” Dissecting the tradition into separate parts and digesting them selectively distorts the source. Shakti cannot be domesticated.

The authentic acceptance of Shakti and kundalini by Christians is much more daunting and would entail rejecting centuries of Church inquisition against pluralistic manifestations of the divine. It would involve reinventing Christianity with the Goddess accessible directly as the Supreme Being. This would rekindle memories of paganism, polytheism and chaos.

Published: 2011

 

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Being Different, Book review

Bhakti Vikas Swami, Vaishnav scholar and ISKCON sannyasi, author of twelve books

August 30, 2011

All Things Must Pass — so sung George Harrison on a megahit album of the same name. George was consciously echoing Krsna’s words in the Bhagavad-gita, which ring through centuries of proud civilizations that have risen, deemed themselves invincible, and inevitably passed.

What so fascinated George — and thousands of his generation — about Eastern culture and thought has remained an abiding and ever-growing passion in the West. Today literally millions of Westerners, dissatisfied with what they perceive as the parochialism and unnecessary aggressiveness of their own culture, have chosen to adopt diverse manifestations of oriental dharmic traditions, perceiving them as more peaceful, wise, and truly spiritual. The concepts of reincarnation and karma, and the practice of yoga and vegetarianism — all largely or exclusively imported from the East — are now commonplace in the occident.

And internationally, the West’s economic, political, and intellectual hegemony — which arose several centuries ago and until recently seemed invincible — is finally showing signs of passing.

Yet although the distinction between East and West is becoming increasingly blurred (sorry, Kipling), distinctly Western presuppositions and underlying modes of perception and conditioning remain as subtle but powerful influences upon both Western practitioners of dharmic traditions and Eastern people steeped in the myth of inherent Western superiority.

Being Different appears at this cultural crossroads. Without rejecting Western contributions to culture and thought, it pinpoints the dominating, yet often unnoticed or veneered, bias toward Western paradigms. It furthermore challenges those perspectives by interjecting perspectives from the dharma traditions (maintaining that they are at least equally valid) with which to view all aspects of being.

Everything must pass, Krsna teaches, but that which is real will remain (Bhagavad-gita 2.16). In a world clearly in need of a rethink, Being Different challenges the West to stop stereotyping older civilizations as inferior and to examine itself through the lens of a culture that has remained while countless others have fallen. Being Different is so different to any previous work, and so compellingly argued, that it promises to initiate transformational discourse in all areas of intellectual activity.

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Being Different, Book review

Dr. Satya Narayan Das, Founder of Jiva Institute of Vedic Studies, Vrindavan

August 30, 2011

Many Indian spiritual leaders, lacking a profound knowledge of their own culture, and feeling inferior to the West, try to respond to the Western challenge by showing how Indian and western religions are the same. They chant “sarva-dharma-sama-bhava” (all religions are equal) out of context, causing much confusion. In the midst of this morass arises the ”lotus of Rajiv” (the word rajiv means a lotus in Sanskrit) in the form of his book, Being Different. Rajiv Malhotra’s work is a kind of yajna that reverses the gaze upon the West through the lens of Indian knowledge systems.  This process is traditionally called purva paksha, and in Rajiv’s work it is given a new mission and a new importance.

The book argues that those aspects of India which appears different, strange, problematic and an exotic mishmash  to the Western eye are, indeed, the key to an underlying unity.  Being Different explains that there is a pristine, all-encompassing, Reality, both immanent and transcendent, that expresses itself as all the varieties, dualities and so-called chaos. There is order in chaos, birth in death, creation in destruction, and simplicity in complexity.

Rajiv Malhotra has devised the very interesting metaphor of digestion to pinpoint the destructive effect of what is usually masqueraded as the assimilation, globalization,  melting pot, or postmodern deconstruction of difference. The dharmic traditions have been a target for digestion into the belly of Western culture. Being Different challenges the legitimacy of such attempts with profound logic and examples. Its analysis of Abrahamic religions shows how they are history-centric. This fixation drives them into claims of exclusiveness and gives them anxiety over cultural differences which they seek to resolve through appropriation, assimilation, conversion – all forms of digestion that obliterate whatever seems challenging. The dharmic traditions are not driven by the same anxieties because of their vision of the integral unity of all existence.

Interestingly, the author has followed the traditional purva paksha style, a distinctive feature of exegesis in Sanskrit. The purva paksha accounts of past debates are no longer relevant in a practical sense, and new purva pakshas are needed for this era. Being Different breaks new ground in that direction. The result is a highly original and sincere attempt to compare the basic paradigms of Indian and Western thought. This book will open the eyes of any fair-minded reader regardless of worldview.

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Being Different, Book review

Dr. Pandya, Head of All World Gayatri Pariwar and Chancellor, Dev Sanskriti University, Haridwar

August 30, 2011

Since time immemorial, Indian spiritual exemplars had a strong tradition of studying competing schools of thoughts and debating them vigorously; but the recent leaders have ignored the need to analyze and debate Western religions and philosophical systems using Indian frameworks. This has allowed Western paradigms to dominate the discourse while Indian ones have become marginalized. In some ways, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan did “reverse the gaze” on the West, and this was vital to the formation of Indian identity in the colonial era. Now, for the 21st century, Rajiv Malhotra has launched the renaissance of this old tradition of purva-paksha, and his book Being Different examines the West as the “other” through the lens of dharma. Rather than positioning the dharma schools in tension with one other, its methodology is to contrast dharma from Western systems and thereby identify the signature principles of Indian civilization. This work should become a textbook and it can galvanize a new generation to start a thought revolution (vichar-kranti). I hope spiritual leaders will study Being Different in order to appreciate dharma’s place in the large canvas of inter-civilization debates, and thereby engage today’s intellectual kurukshetra from a position of strength.

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Being Different, Book review

Shrinivas Tilak, Ph D, history of religions, an independent researcher based in Montreal

August 30, 2011

In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism Rajiv Malhotra has set for himself the challenging task of contesting the self-serving universalism that is readily apparent in the ‘grand narrative’ (whether secular or religious) produced by the West in which, argues Malhotra, the West saw itself as the agent or driver of the world’s historical unfolding and set the template for all nations and peoples of the world. Indeed, European colonial expansion to Africa, Asia, and Latin America was rationalized as an expression of divine plan and will that first became apparent (manifest) and inexorable (destiny) in Britain and the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century reaching the United States by the nineteenth century.

Universalism: Western and Christian
The leitmotif of Western universalism was crystallized in the British patriotic song “Rule, Britannia!” which provided a lasting expression of the colonialist conception of Britain and the British Empire that emerged in the eighteenth century. The phrase “The sun never set on the British Empire,” underscored the height of British Imperialism, when Britain had so many colonies under its control that no matter what time it was, somewhere in the Empire the sun was up. The ‘will to power’ and the ‘urge to dominate the world’ received a philosophical grounding in the hands of what I would call the “Gang of 4 Hs” (i.e. four philosophers of German extraction whose last names begin with the letter H: Georg F. W. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Hacker).

The hermeneutics of identity (subsuming the world within the orbit of the West and Christianity) that they proposed and practiced relegated Indian and other philosophies, cultures, and religions to some primitive forms that (as Hegel put it) must evolve toward the telos of One (read Western and Christian) philosophy, culture, and religion. European military conquests of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the subsequent spin-off of socio-cultural and economic domination of the world led to what Husserl called ‘Europeanization of the Earth,’ i.e. ‘Westernization’ of the Earth since the West was construed as the universalistic claim of Europe (Mohanty 1997: 168).

It is to Malhotra’s credit that he has exposed with consummate skill how and why the ‘will to power and to dominate the world’ is inseparable from and inherent in the very nature of European representational, calculating thought. Not surprisingly, Jacques Derrida adamantly and brazenly declared that only Christianity could produce a concept of universality that has been successfully elaborated into the form which today dominates both philosophy and law globally. Only Britain and the USA have had the potential and power to sustain the “World Order” to assure relative and precarious stability globally. When Derrida makes an allowance for the plurality of religions as ‘world religions’ or ‘religions of the world,’ it is only on the basis of the universalizing and “unifying horizon of paternal-fraternal sameness of religions implicit in Christianity (Derrida 2001: 74).

Being Different persuasively argues that contrary to what Western Christian universalists would want us believe, the Western model of modernity, characterized by the development of rationality and an atomistic individualism, is not the sole way of relating to the world and others. It might have gained currency in the West, but Malhotra is at pains to remind us that even in the West this is far from being the only form of sociality. The West can exist only as part of a multipolar world in equable relation to other political, cultural, and social entities such as exist, for instance, in the model grounded in dharma. Malhotra accordingly makes a fervent plea for instituting equilibrium among regional poles where the differing social, cultural, and religious models for promoting development, democracy, and modernity would be welcome.

Indology: hegemony and asymmetry
India’s military conquest by the British led to the emergence of the discipline of Indology wherein Indian society and culture were (and are today) studied using Western epistemology and social sciences rather than the traditional Indian cognitive categories. This is a sure sign of the socio-cultural hegemony of the West, of what Husserl called the ‘Europeanization of the Earth.’ Indology is also cast in asymmetry—for the West is not studied, expounded, and criticized from the point of view of Indian thought.

Though many recognized the asymmetry of the encounter between the West and India and its outcome (deep cognitive dissonance between lived experience of the Indians and the theorizing about it), only a few academics have had the will to explore the actual feasibility of balancing the terms of the encounter and perhaps reverse the asymmetry of the dialogue. There were some feeble and half-hearted attempts in that direction (India through Hindu categories edited by McKim Marriott, 1989 for instance) but nothing much came out of them. Then, Professor Daya Krishna set up a series of meetings between the pundits and the Western trained Indologists on behalf of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research with a similar objective in mind (Krishna et al 1991). The outcome, however, was not very promising because the set up of the meetings was somewhat artificial and remained embedded in a Westernized context in the absence of prior experience of reaching out for Europe or the West, at least in the recent centuries. Historically, Indians simply have not been prepared for encounters of this type.

Commenting on Daya Krishna’s initiative, Wilhelm Halbfass observed that such experiments ought to be encouraged but any significant hermeneutical reversal cannot be expected from them. “For the time being,” he went on to say, “…there seems to be little choice but to continue the (admittedly asymmetrical) dialogue…” (Halbfass 1990: 229). In support, he cited the caution expressed by J. L. Mehta, the noted Indian philosopher, “…there is no other way open to us, in the East, but to go along with this Europeanization and to go through it…”(Wilhelm Halbfass 1990: 442). More recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty set out in search of a different, non-Western modernity but which ended in a ‘politics of despair’ after his realization that such a task was “impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history, for the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has created” (Chakrabarty 2000).

Malhotra regrets that the Indian academia and intelligentsia continue to accept and tolerate this asymmetry and hegemony as a historical contingency over which Indians did not (and as yet do not) hold any sway. Being Different courageously lays out a specific plan to get out of the Western orbit of knowledge protocols which, in the name of the universality of modernity and science, has trapped India (and the non-West in general) inside the cages of Oriental mysticism and the Asiatic mode of production.

Being Different also uncovers and explores major differences between India and the West that exist because of their markedly distinct philosophies and cosmologies. In this well documented, historical, and interpretive study, Malhotra employs the traditional hermeneutical strategy of purva paksha to examine the West from the Indic and dharmic civilizational points of view challenging many hitherto unexamined beliefs that each side holds about the other: the ‘One’ and many and how the two are related, God/s and creation, time and history, mind and world, identity in relation to difference, reality, and phenomenality. In the process he draws attention to the centrality of the fundamental question of metaphysics to all of them: difference.

Chaos and order
I found particularly informative and instructive Malhotra’s discussion of the role that the notion of chaos plays in the Indic and dharmic world whereas the West absolutely abhors chaos. Hegel, for instance manifested a deep-rooted fear of chaos and uncertainty, privileging instead order in Western aesthetics, ethics, religions, society, and politics. He therefore sought to bring the chaotic diversity of (newly discovered) Oriental cultures, religions, and societies into manageable order by classifying them into ‘pantheism,’ ‘monotheism,’ and ‘polytheism’ as ‘world historical categories’ to provide an intuitive (!) comprehension of the meaning value of each culture. He next came up with a detailed scheme to bring different cultures into a system of equivalences in which relative meaning can be assigned to each culture. Hegel thereby fleshed out the contours of the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest,’ providing conceptual tools for epistemic subjugation of the rest of the world in the name of law and order. The dharmic worldview, on the other hand, has always seen chaos as a creative catalyst built into the cosmos to balance out order that could become stultifying, and hence it adopts a more relaxed attitude towards chaos.

In sum, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism is a meticulously documented piece of work providing an original, constructive, and insightful interpretation of why the West and the rest of the world must recognize and respect the distinct identity of India and its civilization.

References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “Above All, No Journalists!” In Religion and Media edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1990. India and Europe: an essay in understanding. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Krishna, Daya et al, eds. 1991. Samvada. Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, in association with Motilal Banarasidass.
Marriott, McKim, ed. 1989. India through Hindu Categories. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1997. “Between Indology and Indian Philosophy.” In Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies edited by Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, 163-170, Amsterdam-Atlanta,GA: Rodopi.

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